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What insects live in friendly, hardworking families. Bees and ants are social insects. VII. Homework assignment

Ants - social insects

Well, what are ants like? Everyone has seen them. This is a separate family of Hymenoptera insects; in addition to ants, the order Hymenoptera also includes other very famous, well-known inhabitants of the earth, such as bees and wasps. And ants differ from bees and wasps primarily in that they have wingless workers. All bees, all wasps, they are winged, so to speak, almost all of them. Only females and males are winged before mating. Ants have three castes.

All of the insects listed are social insects, but with a small caveat: bees and wasps can be both solitary and social. And all ants are exclusively social. There is not a single species among ants that leads a solitary lifestyle. And there are actually more than ten thousand species of ants around the world.

What is sociality for insects? This means that they live in a permanent community, a long-lasting community, which we call a family because it is a family in origin. And this family consists of three castes - these are females who lay eggs, that is, this is a reproductive individual, these are males who appear in the family for a very short time and after fertilization of the females, in most species the males die. They die naturally, their life is over. But there are some species that have a slightly different system, but there are no such species in Russia, so we will focus on our domestic ants. The majority of the population consists of working individuals. In principle, these are physiologically underdeveloped females that perform all the functions of building a nest, obtaining food, defense, feeding the brood, caring for the female and larvae. That is, the entire life of the family is provided by working individuals. And when we talk about the organization of the family, about the evolution of the social way of life in ants, this is, first of all, the development of relationships in the system of working individuals, which, as the family grows, begin to perform various functions and gain the opportunity, firstly, to realize specialization , and secondly, they are able to perform whole line tasks that are simply impossible in small families. This is, for example, maintaining an active temperature in the nest.

Ants, in principle, are all tropical, subtropical insects by origin. And while they lived and live there, all problems associated with maintaining temperature are solved there naturally. True, there is a situation when they have to arrange ventilation to prevent overheating. But in our conditions, conditions temperate climate, the situation is different. In order for the ants' larvae to develop normally, and ants are insects with complete metamorphosis. That is, they first develop a larva separately, then it pupates, most species entwine the pupa with a cocoon, and then an adult insect emerges from the pupa, which does not grow any further and does not change morphologically throughout its adult life.

How long does an ant live?

The ant lives for a very long time. If we talk about the life of a worker, then a worker ant in our ordinary ants can live up to seven years. And an oviparous female up to 20 years old is an absolute record in the insect world. The reason they live so long is that they have a well-functioning social system. They organized the high life expectancy that we care so much about long ago.

Social and domesticated insects

Most insects lead a solitary lifestyle. However, there is alsosocial insects . These includetermites, bumblebees, wasps, bees, ants . The community of these insects is one large extended family. Social insects share food with each other, jointly care for larvae, and guard the nest.

Bees and ants are social insects

Bees.Social insects includehoney bee . A large family of bees numbers up to 100 thousand individuals that live in the hive. In a hive, most insects areworkers bees. These are infertile females in which a modified ovipositor servessting . They clean the hive, collect nectar, care for the queen and larvae, and protect the hive from enemies. They live for one warm season (less than a year). In a bee family, the main bee isuterus which lays eggs - up to 2000 per day. The queen bee is larger than the worker bees. She lives for about five years. In the spring, in May - June, a new queen and several dozen males appear from the pupae in the bee colony, which are calleddrones: They do not take any part in the work, and their main task is fertilization of the uterus. In the fall, worker bees drive the remaining drones out of the hive and they die.

All care for the hive lies with the worker bees: growing up, each worker bee changes several “professions”. She builds honeycombs, cleans the cells, feeds the larvae, takes food from arriving bees and distributes it in the hive, ventilates the hive, guards it and, finally, begins to fly out of the hive for nectar. Bees communicate with each other in the same way as ants - through touch and secreted substances.

However, only bees have a “dance language”. With the help of special body movements and movements, one bee can tell others where nectar-rich bees are located. flowering plants . A scout bee "dances" in the hive on the honeycomb.

On the underside of the worker bee's abdomen there are special glands that secretewax . Bees, thanks to complex instincts, build from ithoneycomb . On the hind legs of bees there are areas surrounded by long chitinous hairs - baskets. Bees crawl on flowers, and pollen falls on the hairs of the insect's body. Then the bee cleans the pollen into the basket using special brushes on its legs. Soon a lump of pollen forms there - pollen, which the bee transfers to the hive.Perga - pollen soaked in honey serves as a reserve of protein food for the bee colony.

Worker bees have a peculiar expansion of the esophagus -honey goiter . The main supply of food for the bee colony is formed from the nectar collected from flowers, which has passed through the honey sac.honey . The cells are filled with honey and the bees cover them with a thin wax layer. In a year you can get up to 100 kg of honey from one bee colony.

Although people have been raising bees for a long time, collapsible frame hives were invented relatively recently - in 1814 by the Ukrainian beekeeper P. I. Prokopovich. Before this, in order to extract honey from a bee’s nest, which, as a rule, was located in a hollowed-out tree log, it was necessary to break the honeycomb, that is, to ruin the bee family. The surviving swarm of bees can live independently, without human help. This indicates that bees are not yet fully domesticated.

Ants- social hymenoptera. They do not have a sting, but they have a poisonous gland, thanks to which they can protect themselves from enemies. Red forest ants bring great benefits to the forest. The ants of one anthill eat tens of thousands of insects per day and protect a forest covering an area of ​​0.2 hectares from pests. They live in families.

The anthill consists of above-ground and underground parts. Most of the ants living in the anthill are wingless workers - these are sterile females. Their number sometimes reaches a million. Besides them, the queen lives in the anthill. She also doesn't have wings. She breaks them off after the mating flight. She lays eggs all her life, and all the care for the anthill lies with the working ants. They obtain food, repair and clean the anthill, feed the larvae and the queen, and defend the anthill in case of attack by enemies. Once a year, at the beginning of summer, winged females and males appear in the anthill from pupae and set off on a mating flight. After mating, the males die, and the females shed their wings and establish a new anthill. They can also end up in the anthill in which they developed.

Most ants are predators. Some feed on the sweet secretions of aphids. For this purpose, ants protect, “graze”these insects feed on plants, and sometimes shelters are built for them. Other types of ants breed mushrooms in underground chambers for their food, bringing crushed plant leaves for this. There are herbivorous ants.

Ants communicate by touching each other with their antennae, legs and heads. In addition, they have a “chemical language” - they secrete special substances with which they mark their paths. Ants recognize relatives and enemies by smell.

WITH false behavior of social insects is called instinctive because instinct - a set of innate aspects of behavior, fixed hereditarily and characteristic of a certain species of animal. The behavior of bees, ants and some other animals is so surprising and complex that it leads many people to believe that it is intelligent. However, these actions of animals are instinctive and unconscious.

Domesticated insects

There is only one thing completelydomesticated insect , not found in nature in the wild, -silkworm ; females of this species have even “forgot how” to fly. An adult insect is a thick butterfly with whitish wings with a span of up to 6 cm. The caterpillars of this silkworm eat only mulberry or mulberry leaves.

Scientists suggest that in the wild, the ancestor of the silkworm lived in the foothills of the Himalayas. The butterfly was domesticated in China around 3 thousand years BC. e. Nowadays, this insect is completely domesticated. It is bred in China, Japan, Indochina, Southern Europe, South America, Central Asia and the Caucasus - where the mulberry tree can grow. There are several dozen breeds of silkworms, varying in length, strength and color of the silk thread they produce.

Female silkworms lay eggs (each female - up to 600 eggs), which are calledGreena . Caterpillars emerge from them. These caterpillars are fed mulberry leaves in special rooms on feeding shelves. During pupation, each caterpillar howls for three days.

Lesson topic : Bees and ants are social insects. Beneficial insects, pest insects.Meaning in nature and human life.

Lesson objectives: reveal the structural features of the honey bee and ant in connection with the social way of life; talk about their role in nature and human life; reveal the diversity of insect pests, their negative role in human practice; outline the importance of insects in nature and human life.

Equipment: insect collection,multimedia projector, presentation, handouts: tables, sheets of paper, markers.

During the classes:

I. org. moment (1 min) II. Update background knowledge (10 min) Test work with mutual verification.

Write down the test numbers, against each - the correct answer options

Option 1.

A. Dragonflies B. Orthoptera C. Bugs

1. Two pairs of wings.
2. The larva has a mask.

Option 2.

What features are characteristic of insects from the order

A. Butterflies B. Diptera C. Hymenoptera

1. Development with complete transformation.
2. Development with incomplete transformation.
3. Two pairs of wings.
4. One pair of wings, the second is reduced (haleteres) and serves to stabilize the flight.
5. The first pair of wings are transformed into hard elytra, the second pair are leathery wings.
6. The front wings are denser than the hind wings.
7. The elytra are dense in front and soft in the back; the second pair of wings is used for flight.
8. There are small chitinous scales on the wings.
9. The oral apparatus of adult insects is of the sucking type.
10. Mouthparts of the licking type.
11. The oral apparatus in adult insects is of the piercing-sucking type.
12. In larvae oral apparatus gnawing type.
13. The hind legs of many representatives are of the jumping type.
14. The larva has a mask.

Option 1. A: 2,3,14; B: 2, 3,7,12,13; B: 2,6,11

Option 2. A: 1,3,8,9,12 B: 1,4,10,11 C: 1,3

III. Activation of cognitive activity. (2 minutes)

Most insects lead a solitary lifestyle, but there are insects that live in large groups. What insects are these? (bees, ants, termites) Such insects are called social and they live in families.

IV. learning new material(25min)

Teacher's story.

Which of these insects do you think have long become human pets? (bees)

Where do bees live? (hive)

Honey and wax, together with furs, were considered the main items of trade among our Slavic ancestors. Honey was used instead of sugar, wax was used in candles. In those days there were no apiaries yet, and people provided hollows of forest trees for bees - “bortni” - beekeeping. At the same time, the hives were often ruined.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Ukrainian landowner Pyotr Ivanovich Prokopovich first used the collapsible frame hive he invented, which is still in use today.

Let's look at what the bee family is.

Student message.Composition of a bee family. (presentation)

As the story progresses, students fill out the table.

Students independently fill out the table for the ant family section, using the textbook pp. 135-136.

Table. Composition of ant and bee families:

While completing the task, the teacher makes sure that the whole class is involved in the work, approaches the students, monitors the progress of the task, and makes corrections if necessary.

After completing the task, the teacher asks questions to the class:

• Did everyone complete the task?
• What difficulties arose when completing the task, what was not clear?

Bees and ants communicate with each other through touch and secretions. But only bees have a “dance language.” Video fragment.

What do you think? challenging behavior Can you call it reasonable? (No)

Their behavior is instinctive, unconscious.

Writing in a notebook. Instinct- a set of innate aspects of behavior, fixed hereditarily and characteristic of a certain species of animal.

Besides beneficial insects there are also pests cultivated plants and vectors of human diseases.

The study of the material occurs in the process of conversation. Students work with handouts: tables, insects.

Exercise : determine which order your insect belongs to and what harm it causes to crop plants.

Response Plan:

1. Squad name.

2. Name of the insect.

3. Signs of the squad.

4. Meaning.

Carriers of plague, tularemia, typhus

Students write down their answers in their notebooks. Several students are interviewed. Grades are given. Additionally

. What methods can be used to control pests?

During the conversation, it turns out that the proposed options can be divided into four groups:

Biological V. Fixing the material.

What insects did we meet today?

What characteristics are found in families?

What insects harm agricultural plants? Describe the life activity of some of them.

VI. Reflection. (1min) Draw your mood as a smiley face.

VII. D\Z Repeat topics in the arthropods section. Preparation for the test.

Application. The queen bee is the largest bee in the hive, 18-20 mm. It has a long abdomen with an ovipositor designed for constant laying of eggs. Cannot feed on his own. She is fed by worker bees with crop milk. There is always only one in the family. The uterus develops from fertilized eggs. Lives up to 5 years. When another queen appears, the old one flies away with some of the bees. This process is called swarming.

Drones are males, with long wings and large eyes. They develop from unfertilized eggs. Their task is to fertilize the uterus. They live for one season. In the fall they die, they are stung by worker bees or simply driven out of the hive.

Worker bees are sterile females. Workers provide the livelihoods of the whole family (collect food, care for the larvae, feed them, clean the hive, build honeycombs, and prepare honey). To perform these functions they have a number of devices:

• Oral apparatus;
• Body covered with villi;
• Honey goiter;
• The sting is a modified ovipositor;
• Hind limbs with baskets and brushes.

Social insects. Most insects lead a solitary lifestyle. However, there are also social insects. These include termites, bumblebees, wasps, ants, and bees. The community of these insects is one large extended family. There are separate groups in the family that perform different functions: they collect food, share it with each other, care for the larvae, and guard the nest.

Most of the ants living in the anthill (Fig. 104) are wingless workers - these are sterile females. Their number sometimes reaches a million. Besides them, the queen lives in the anthill. She also doesn't have wings. She breaks them off after the mating flight. She lays eggs all her life, and all the care for the anthill lies with the working ants. They obtain food, repair and clean the anthill, feed the larvae and the queen, and defend the anthill in case of attack by enemies.

Once a year, at the beginning of summer, winged females and males appear in the anthill from pupae and set off on a mating flight. After mating, the males die, and the females shed their wings and establish a new anthill. Most ants are predators. Some feed on the sweet secretions of aphids. To do this, ants protect, “graze” these insects feeding on plants, and sometimes build shelters for them.

Rice. 104. Cross section of an anthill: 1 - chambers with eggs; 2 - chambers with larvae: 3 - chambers with pupae

Other types of ants breed mushrooms in underground chambers to feed on them, bringing in crushed plant leaves. There are herbivorous ants. Ants communicate by touching each other with their antennae, legs and heads. In addition, they have a “chemical language” - they secrete special substances with which they mark their paths. Ants recognize relatives and enemies by smell.

The honey bee is a social insect. A large family of bees numbers up to 100 thousand individuals that live in a hive (Fig. 105, A). In a hive, most insects are worker bees. These are sterile females in which a modified ovipositor serves as a sting. They clean the hive, collect nectar, care for the queen and larvae, and protect the hive from enemies. They live only one season (about a year). In a bee family, the main bee is the queen bee, who lays up to 2000 eggs per day. She lives for about five years. In the spring, in May - June, a new queen and several dozen males, called drones, appear in the bee colony from the pupae: they do not take any part in the work, and their main task is to fertilize the queen. The old female leaves the hive with some of the worker bees - swarming occurs. Beekeepers collect the swarm and place it in a new hive. In the fall, worker bees drive the remaining drones out of the hive and they die.

Rice. 105. Bees: A - Bee hive; B - diagram of the “dance” of bees

All care of the hive lies with the worker bees: growing up, each worker bee changes several “professions”. First, they build honeycombs, clean the cells, feed the larvae, take food from arriving bees and distribute it in the hive, ventilate the hive, guard it and, finally, begin to fly out of the hive for nectar. Bees communicate with each other, like ants, through touch and secretions.

However, only bees have a “dance language”. With the help of special body movements and movements, one bee can tell others where flowering plants rich in nectar are located (Fig. 105, B). A scout bee “dances” in the hive on the honeycomb.

The complex behavior of social insects is called instinctive, because instinct is a set of innate forms of behavior, fixed hereditarily and characteristic of a certain species of animal. The behavior of social insects is so complex that it leads many people to believe that they are intelligent. However, these actions of animals are instinctive and unconscious.

Humans have been breeding honey bees for a long time. It is spread all over to the globe. A person receives wax, honey, various medications(propolis, bee venom, bee jelly).

On the underside of the worker bee's abdomen there are special glands that secrete wax. Bees use it to build honeycombs. On the hind legs of bees there are areas surrounded by long chitinous hairs - baskets. Bees crawl on flowers, and pollen gets on the hairs of their bodies. Then the bee cleans the pollen into the basket using special brushes on its legs. Soon a lump of pollen forms there - pollen, which the bee transfers to the hive. Bee bread - pollen soaked in honey - serves as a reserve of protein food for the bee colony.

Worker bees have a peculiar extension of the esophagus - a honey goiter. From the nectar collected from flowers, which has passed through the honey sac, the main food supply of the bee colony is formed - honey. The cells are filled with honey and the bees cover them with a thin wax layer. In a year you can get up to 100 kg of honey from one bee colony.

Although people have been raising bees for a long time, collapsible frame hives were invented relatively recently - in 1814. Russian beekeeper P.I. Prokopovich. Before this, in order to extract honey from a bee’s nest, which, as a rule, was located in a hollowed-out tree log, it was necessary to break the honeycomb, that is, to ruin the bee family. The surviving swarm of bees can live independently, without human help. This indicates that bees are not yet fully domesticated.

Silkworm. There are other insects that are beneficial to humans. These are silkworms. This the only insect, not found in nature in the wild (Fig. 106). Its females even “forgot how” to fly. An adult insect is a thick butterfly with whitish wings with a span of up to 6 cm. The caterpillars of this silkworm eat only mulberry or mulberry leaves.

Rice. 106. Stages of development of the silkworm: 1 - female laying eggs; 2 - caterpillar; 3 - cocoon formation; 5 - pupae in a cocoon

Scientists suggest that in the wild, the ancestor of the silkworm lived in the foothills of the Himalayas. Silkworms began to be bred in China around 3000 BC. e. Nowadays, this insect is completely domesticated. Now it is bred in China, Japan, Indochina, Southern Europe, South America, Central Asia and the Caucasus - where mulberry grows. There are several dozen breeds of silkworms, varying in length, strength and color of the silk thread they produce.

Female silkworms lay eggs (each - up to 600 eggs), which are called grena. Caterpillars emerge from them. These caterpillars are kept in special rooms on food shelves and fed with mulberry leaves. During pupation, each caterpillar spins a cocoon for three days from a very thin thread, the length of which reaches 1500 m.

Silk thread is secreted by a special silk gland located on lower lip caterpillars.

Sericulture breeders collect the finished cocoons, treat them with hot steam, and then use special machines to unwind the silk threads. Some of the cocoons are left for breeding butterflies.

Silk is used in light industry to produce fabrics, in medicine (it is used to make threads for stitching wounds) and in aviation.

Insect protection. A person greatly influences environment(plows up virgin steppes, cuts down forests, uses pesticides). Therefore, the numbers of many animal species, including insects, are declining. Some species are on the verge of extinction. Due to this rare species insects are taken under oxpairy. Red Books have been created, which contain information about specially protected rare animals (Fig. 107), the reasons for their plight and protection measures. Among the insects of our country listed in the Red Book, there is the steppe racket - a large steppe grasshopper that lives in the steppes in southern Russia. The distribution area of ​​this grasshopper has decreased due to the plowing of virgin steppes. Of the beetles, several species of large predatory beetles - ground beetles - have found their way onto the pages of the Red Book. On South Far East The largest beetle in Russia is protected - the relic woodcutter, whose body length reaches 10.8 cm, the length of the larvae up to 17 cm. It was included in the pages of the Red Book in connection with the cutting down of old trees, in the wood of which its larvae develop.

Rice. 107. Rare and protected insects: 1 - steppe racket; 2 - Apollo; 3 - Far Eastern relic woodcutter; 4 - Caucasian ground beetle; 5 - wall bumblebee; 6 - mother of pearl zenobia

Many species of bumblebees are also listed in the Red Book, for example the variable bumblebee and the steppe bumblebee. Among the butterflies listed in the Red Book are Apollo, mpemosina, and mother-of-pearl zenobia. They are protected by the Law “On the Protection of Wildlife”.

The role of insects in natural communities is enormous. Insects are the most important pollinators of flowering plants. They serve as food for various invertebrates (spiders, centipedes), fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and animals, even some insectivorous plants (sundews). Among the insects there are many orderlies who help process minerals organic remains of plants and animals. Soil insects and their larvae increase soil fertility by mixing and fertilizing it with their excrement. The role of insects in the cycle of substances in nature is great.

Exercises based on the material covered

1. What features of behavior and lifestyle are characteristic of the inhabitants of the anthill?
2. Describe the composition of the bee colony and the functions of each group of bees.
3. Why are ants and bees classified as social insects? Explain their meaning in nature and in human life.
4. On the basis of what characteristics are the silkworm classified as domestic animals? What is the value in economic activity does this insect have a person?